Swift Numerics
swift.org
Swift Numerics
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Swift Numerics
#2You may find this article I wrote useful background for understanding the capabilities of numerical computing in Swift, including details about a library which provides features overlapping with the new Swift package: https://www.fast.ai/2019/01/10/swift-numerics/
Re: Swift Numerics
#3Really looking forward to ShapedArray. Eventually a lot of what one might do with Python may be available in Swift.
Re: Swift Numerics
#4I am also happy to see that sometime in the last several years slices of arrays became views rather than copies. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/swift/arrayslice
Re: Swift Numerics
#5You may find this article I wrote useful background for understanding the capabilities of numerical computing in Swift, including details about a library which provides features overlapping with the new Swift package: https://www.fast.ai/2019/01/10/swift-numerics/
Thanks, it is a well written article. The only part which tarnishes an otherwise excellent article is the language comparisons portion. Such things are best avoided as they almost always reflect the biases of or where the author has the most experience.
As you acknowledge, you were unfair to Julia. Julia has excellent support for general purpose programming. It has support for multiple dispatch, a quite powerful organizational construct rarely found in other languages, for example. Where it might fall short is in the number of general purpose libraries but that shouldn’t matter as much for ML. It certainly isn’t lacking for numeric libraries.
For Java, it’s unclear what you mean by JVM issues but with GraalVM and Scala or Kotlin, I fail to identify any major issues.
F# on .net core can be distributed without installing a runtime nor does garbage collection limit its expressiveness. It is among the fastest, in the Go/Java/Ocaml/Swift tier, which is next fastest after C/C++/Rust/Fortran. Compare https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/... to https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/.... Setting aside the problems of microbenchmarks and unidiomatic code, they’re both within spitting distance of each other, both wining and losing with no significant margin. Their runtime also recently introduced SIMD and fine-grained memory management support.
I'd say practically speaking, Swift's current great weakness is its cross platform support, when compared to Julia, Kotlin/Scala or C#/F#.
Swift is an excellent language and it’s great a numeric programming ecosystem is being built for it. There’s no need to justify its existence by misrepresenting or downplaying the capabilities of competing ecosystems. I also saw this occur for why differentiable programming in Swift and not Julia. The more the merrier, I say. Let the various communities collaborate and share ideas in order to better explore the space of possibilities and ideas.
Re: Swift Numerics
#6You may find this article I wrote useful background for understanding the capabilities of numerical computing in Swift, including details about a library which provides features overlapping with the new Swift package: https://www.fast.ai/2019/01/10/swift-numerics/
Thanks, it is a well written article. The only part which tarnishes an otherwise excellent article is the language comparisons portion. Such things are best avoided as they almost always reflect the biases of or where the author has the most experience. As you acknowledge, you were unfair to Julia. Julia has excellent support for general purpose programming. It has support for multiple dispatch, a quite powerful orga…
>F# on .net core can be distributed without installing a runtime
how?
Re: Swift Numerics
#7Awesome. Now who wants to make a hypercomplex numbers library (quaternions, Clifford, Cayley-Dixon...) in Swift?
Re: Swift Numerics
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, it is a well written article. The only part which tarnishes an otherwise excellent article is the language comparisons portion. Such things are best avoided as they almost always reflect the biases of or where the author has the most experience. As you acknowledge, you were unfair to Julia. Julia has excellent support for general purpose programming. It has support for multiple dispatch, a quite powerful orga…
>F# on .net core can be distributed without installing a runtime how?
By bundling. I believe there are couple a options to reduce the resulting package size some. As with all things, it's a matter of priorities when weighing language and deployment options.
Re: Swift Numerics
#9You may find this article I wrote useful background for understanding the capabilities of numerical computing in Swift, including details about a library which provides features overlapping with the new Swift package: https://www.fast.ai/2019/01/10/swift-numerics/
Thanks, it is a well written article. The only part which tarnishes an otherwise excellent article is the language comparisons portion. Such things are best avoided as they almost always reflect the biases of or where the author has the most experience. As you acknowledge, you were unfair to Julia. Julia has excellent support for general purpose programming. It has support for multiple dispatch, a quite powerful orga…
On paper F# seems pretty great. Unfortunately, in practice it was the first and so far the only language I've ever used that I never found myself enjoying.
I wrote a simple, but relatively robust toy language interpreter in it, so the time I put in wasn't trivial and I kept thinking it would get better, but no such luck. This is just my anecdotal experience though, I know some companies have been wildly successful with F# as the technical foundation for their entire platform. Jet is a great example of one such company.
Re: Swift Numerics
#10Personally, I'd rather get the Swift equivalent of java.util.concurrent.